I am interested in brewing this recipe for Pliny which comes straight from Vinny C. at RR. I have brewed Pliny before but I have used alternative recipes, most of which come from Vinny...but I am interested in trying this one.

This recipe calls for clearing 8 gallons from the mash and bringing to a boil--I don't have a kettle for 8, can I still brew this with 6 or do I need to use one of my other recipes.

You can scale down the recipe, or you can boil the extra 2 gallons in another pot simultaneously. I have made this recipe a bunch and I look for 7.5 Gallons for a 90 boil. If you use leaf hops you'll have more losses to hops then if you use Pellets FYI, so keep that in mind.

Feel free to ask anything else if you like, I've done this one several times (I'm not unique in that sense I certain!) and my best batch included me having a neighbor over who is a professional distributor and after 2 pints he just HAD to take a look inside my kegerator to make sure it wasn't an actual keg of Pliny I had in there! We did a side by side and I was as close to the bottled version as one batch of Pliny is to the next...so I'd say it was cloned. Low mash temp (as mentioned in the article) is an important part of cloning this beer.

Yes. you do it toward the end of the boils when the boil off has given you enough room to put them together.

FWIW, I described my "most cloned" batch. Like all homebrewers I have a range of results using the same recipe/process...they've all turned out pretty good actually, which is better then I can say for one of my Blind Pig brews!

Yes. you do it toward the end of the boils when the boil off has given you enough room to put them together.

FWIW, I described my "most cloned" batch. Like all homebrewers I have a range of results using the same recipe/process...they've all turned out pretty good actually, which is better then I can say for one of my Blind Pig brews!

How do you do this in terms of hop additions, do you do 5 gallon in one, 3 in another and adjust the hops by percent?

How do you do this in terms of hop additions, do you do 5 gallon in one, 3 in another and adjust the hops by percent?

You can, and there's probably incremental utilization benefits to doing this, but I think it's diminishing returns. I'd just put all the hops in the larger boil and as it boils off a quart or two at a time, add the smaller batch to the larger. If you have 6G of boil space, and 7.5G of wort, and boil off say 1G/hour...by the end of 90 minutes you're right where you need to be. It may actually HELP you though to split the hops up in terms of space..because that beer requires what seems like a truckload of hops. If you do split the hops up..tbh, I'd just complete the batch the way you started it, and don't merge them until you either whirlpool (if you do) or in the fermenter itself.

Edit, I was thinking 6G and 1.5G but 5 and 3 are so close in size I recant...yes...I'd split up the hop additions. The sugar though, I usually put in at the 1Min to go mark and I'd put that all into the bigger kettle.

How do you do this in terms of hop additions, do you do 5 gallon in one, 3 in another and adjust the hops by percent?

that's what i would do. since ~60% of your wort is in the 5 gallon pot, put about 60% of your hops in there. no need to get too scientific about it, eye-balling should be fine.

the problem with putting all your hops in only the large pot is that you will can have hop utilization issues on a hoppy beer like this one. wort will saturate with alpha acids and won't isomerize them all. IBU calculations vary depending on the amount of wort, 8 gallons will be able to extract more bitterness from a given amount of hops than a 5 gallon batch. even if you're adding wort from the small pot to replace the boil-off on the larger portion, that added portion will not have been there the whole 60 or 90 minutes so will not have had the same opportunity to isomerize.

this probably wouldn't be a concern with a less hoppy beer, but i think that the effect will be noticeable on a DIPA like this one.

^ The reason I said "incremental" is because I've tasted an extract batch of this with a 2.5G boil and a 2.5G top up..and all the hops went into the boil and I didn't notice a big difference. That's just anecdotal, but I've found that so much of this beer has to do with the late additions rather then the bittering additions....the IBUs generally aren't a problem.

Edit: I BREWED the extract version. All the subsequent versions were all grain...